Designer of the Year: The Incredible Suit-Shrinking Man

Continued (page 3 of 5)

(In the early ’90s, Browne lived in a studio apartment in Los Angeles. “He spent eight months doing it up before he allowed me to see it,” says Libertine designer Johnson Hartig, who later became Browne’s roommate. “There was one severe midcentury love seat in the living room. That was it. And he was so opposed to what the toilet seat in the bathroom looked like that he took it off. He thought that was more aesthetically pleasing, although it was really inconvenient to use. I remember thinking, God—this guy -really suffers for his art!”)

We sit with him at Café Cluny, tell him this theory we’ve been formulating, about the gradual, and then precipitous, erosion of the national dress code, about the advent of casual Fridays and “dressy sneakers,” and how instead of setting men free, these developments actually created a whole new set of problems for the Public Man, who had to navigate a bewildering range of options just to get dressed in the morning.

“There was something nice about the days when everyone put a suit on to go to work,” Browne agrees. “Sometimes, when it comes to clothing, people having too much of a choice is not the best thing.”

Browne, 42, grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in woods turning suburban. He was closest to his younger sister Jean, because they were on the swim team together, but he also says Jean has described Young Thom as “boring.”

“I wasn’t, though,” Browne says. “I was just quiet. I liked to spend time by myself.”

So he was mostly alone, or underwater. It wasn’t bad. There was school, there was sports, and when he did well in both, he was happy. He wore Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers, like everybody else.

He did plays in school, took art classes, but the idea that you could make a career for yourself in a creative field never occurred to him. You became a lawyer or a businessman. Everyone in Browne’s immediate family is a lawyer or a businessman except Mary Beth, who became a surgeon. Browne went to Notre Dame after high school, opted out of a Japanese-studies major when his swim-team commitments got in the way of a year abroad, ended up majoring in business.

He doesn’t have an artist’s flight-from-suburban-conformity story to tell. He liked conformity. No one else in his family does anything like what he does, but he never talks about it in terms of rebellion. In a lot of ways, the conceptual Thom Browne Man—fit, successful, dressed according to certain normative standards—is exactly the man Browne’s own upbringing should have produced. Except, y’know, not so much.

Browne graduated with no desire to use that business degree, moved to Los Angeles, tried acting. Somewhere there exists a Motrin commercial in which he plays a runner with a side ache. He picked up day-job work at a casting agency. Treaded water. Went to some parties, met Hartig, who used to be another actor of undistinguished portfolio. Hartig altered vintage clothes and wore them around. Hartig cut up old suits, tweaked the silhouette.

By watching Hartig experiment with suits, Browne says, “I got the bug to do it, but I knew I wanted to actually make them, from scratch.” Early on, he’d wash vintage suits and throw them in the dryer. He was trying to make them look like Thom Browne suits before anybody knew what a Thom Browne suit was. He was thinking about that late-’50s-early-’60s organization-man moment, post–electric typewriter, pre–Meet the

Beatles. He wanted a suit that looked the way he thought suits had looked back then. The distinction matters; the silhouette of the Thom Browne suit actually, technically started out as Browne misremembering classic American tailoring.

“If you look at JFK,” Browne says, “the suits he used to wear—I always thought the jacket was shorter. In actuality, it wasn’t so short. The trousers weren’t as slim as they seemed. In my head, it was different.”

This was L.A. in the ’90s—the city and the moment that gave us the chain wallet, the barbed-wire tattoo, guys dressing like cast members from the Broadway version of Monster Garage—and going out in shrunken Brooks Brothers was a protest against the tyranny of the casual. A conformist uniform became a nonconformist gesture; Browne didn’t like L.A., and dressing like he did externalized his out-of-placeness. He wore gray flannel because gray flannel was the way he felt inside. People laughed. People asked why he was so dressed up. Where the flood was.

Finally, in 1998, he sold his old diesel Mercedes and moved to New York. Inside of two weeks, he had a wholesale job at Armani. (“I was the only one,” he says, “that ever bought anything in a 36 short.”) He moved on to Club Monaco, where he designed slim trousers, cardigans, oxford shirts—the kind of stuff he wanted to wear. He says the customers didn’t feel the same way about it; Club Monaco CEO John Mehas puts it more diplomatically, saying Browne helped “evolve” the Club Monaco man and that his stuff “performed well in major metro areas—New York, Los Angeles.”

(Go into a Club Monaco today and it’s all, like, Browne-y—cashmere cardigans, gray suits, Pencey Prep crests. His influence is everywhere. At this point, anyone lacking the resources to shop at Thom Browne can probably build a Thom Browne–esque wardrobe from various stores around the mall. Thom Browne sneezes and H&M and Banana Republic catch colds.)